Dishonest Logic

Slate published an interesting article this past week with the title "Gorsuch’s First Anti-Gay Dissent Has a Huge Factual Error -- and Terrible, Dishonest Logic" (link here).

As the piece details, Gorsuch blatantly misstated the facts in an important LGBT rights case that the Supreme Court just decided. The Slate writer asked the lawyer representing the same=sex couple why: "I think he’s deliberately trying to muddy the waters."

Gorsuch also tried to pick apart the same-sex couple's legal strategy in standing up for their rights for what the Slate writer speculates might be nefarious reasons. The couple's attorney explained why: "I think he’s trying to provide a road map for hostile state courts.... He wants to recast family law in this narrowly biologistic way that’s reverse engineered to exclude gay people."

The fact that Gorsuch is trying to pull such stunts should be no surprise. He's so far to the right on the conservative philosophical spectrum that an anti-LGBT animus is to be expected, even if his record as a judge before arriving at the Supreme Court was silent about his philosophy on LGBT issues.

One is left wondering if Donald Trump's administration -- actually the people at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society who picked Trump's first Supreme Court nominee for him -- deliberately selected a justice nominee who they strongly suspected was stridently anti-LGBT, a sleeper justice of sorts. One has to also wonder if they privately determined this by communicating directly to Gorsuch through unofficial channels.

Whatever the answer, and it will probably never be known, it's pretty clear that "friend of the gays" Trump nominated a strongly anti-LGBT Supreme Court justice. And if he has a chance to nominate more justices, Trump will do te exact same thing, picking a nominee who is secretly and strongly anti-LGBT.

But as most of us here have recognized, Trump is no friend of the LGBT community. That was just another one of his many lies.